The tinsel is up, the twinkle lights are decorating our night skylines, the party invites are in and the season of the continual food and beverage hangover has well and truly started. This time of year means parties and celebrations and for some it can’t come soon enough. For others it’s a small personal hell.

 You want to burn bright not burn out! 

The final run to the 31st December can either spur you on to finalise projects or send you into overwhelm triggered procrastination.

We often see articles about surviving the food and beverage choices of this season but what of the pressure to finish strong without burned out and exhaustion. In a 2017 survey conducted by SuperFriend which covered 5000 business owners, managers and employees in small, medium and large businesses, they found that Australia has a long way to go before our workers are thriving in the context of workplace mental health and well-being. One in five Australians every year will experience mental illness and one in six are working Australians. The pressure of Christmas, be it providing for the family, isolation from family, pressure to deliver end of year results, all contribute to greater levels of stress and impact mental health. This intern obviously impacts productivity.

Here are three tips to help you finish 2017 strong and start your Christmas festivities without a ‘work-hangover’:

  1. List your current projects, tasks and priorities. Once listed determine which one’s must be completed first and before year’s end. Then determine which one’s can be delegated/outsourced, deleted and delayed. Re-prioritising now eliminates the panicked feeling of having to finish everything, when in reality, you don’t. Really, you don’t.
  2. Of the top priority tasks and projects, break each down into small actions and note the first thing you must do. So often a project goes un-started because it’s too big in our minds and we don’t break it down enough to work out the necessary first step. Work out the first step.
  3. This may be the toughest one. Everything on your list cannot be a top priority. In this switched-on, plugged-in world our sense of important has been over run with a sustained level of urgency and immediacy and this clouds our judgment to act on what is truly important. Urgent is a crisis, important is relationships, projects that bring revenue, sales ready for 2018.

I wish you an amazing run up to the end of 2017 and trust these tips set you up for a strong finish to the year without the burn out.

I’d love to know your thoughts.